A Beautiful Castle

I’m having a succession of days that are not the best. You know what kind of days I mean. I stay up late with uneasy thoughts on my mind and holes in my soul, pervaded by the darkness of night, and then can’t get out of bed in the morning, fall asleep again, accidentally switch off my alarm clock instead of putting it on snooze and end up having to run to work, picking up new tights in a kombini (convenience store) on the way because mine burst as I try to speed things up running. At the kombini that’s usually empty, five people are standing in front of me, all wanting to pay their gas bills and buy nikuman (big Chinese meat-filled dumplings) and have them warmed up. I realise I have no money left and run across to the post office to withdraw some, but it is Saturday morning, and the ATM is closed. Relax, it’s not the end of the world. It just gives me heartburn and makes my back even worse that it already is. I’m not even thirty, and I have back pains. Not enough weights workouts, probably. I’m trying to increase my workout number but there is too little time for all the many things I want to do, so I try to do a little bit of everything and never manage to do enough of anything. I have so little time, I hardly get to read. I hardly know what’s going on in the world. I want to study kanji and new words so I understand more of what’s going on in the news I occasionally watch in the evenings. I want to pass the Japanese proficiency test. I want rhythm. I want music. I want, I want, always want what I don’t have. Never mind. I have a job. I get paid. I’m in Japan. I have a place to myself, a world to myself. That’s quite enough. Plod on. Gambare.
To prevent morning haste, which I hate, I get up and go to the gym early and run a number of exhausting, long, fast intervals with only short slower breaks on the treadmill. I have enough time to stretch, shower, and stroll to the station, but before I know it, I’m talking to another runner who, I thought, just wanted to use the treadmill next. But he wants to talk. He is 59 and studied German at university 35 years ago. He can still say “Ich bin Student.” (“I’m a student.”) And he used to run half marathons, but now he just runs 10 km races. I should stay in Japan forever, he tells me. Talk about forever. I try to wrap up the conversation for lack of time. Never enough time. Even friendliness turns into a difficult subject in all this haste.
In the evening I want to go home as soon as possible after my last class to get some sleep. I can hardly suppress my yawns during classes, and it is unthinkable to yawn in front of my students, who are paying a lot of money to get competent, efficient, friendly English teachers, wide eyed and bushy tailed, which by definition, mustn’t yawn. Hagakure cautions the samurai that he should lick his mouth when he has to yawn, in order to suppress it. I try my best to heed that old samurai advice but feel that constantly licking my mouth in class won’t make a great impression, either. I was chosen to go on a special teachers’ training program starting in Tokyo in two weeks, so I have to pull myself together and serve my master single-mindedly. Continue to spur a running horse. Plunge recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.
Somehow, paperwork pops up out of nowhere, and the computer needs some time to recover from an unexpected attack to his carotid arteries, so I can’t log myself out of the system and have to wait, captured in a virtual world of real working hours. When I get to the train station, I can spot the socially inept pervert who told me he had always dreamed of having a foreigner by his side the other night. And I was pretty, and he wanted to go for a drink with me. I don’t want to talk to him again, so I hide behind a kiosk, make sure I get on a different coach, and get off at Hattori, not Sone, so he can’t catch up with me.
I have to force myself out of bed again. But I’m motivated. My first destination today is Shōsenji for women’s aikido training.
Where I’m not told to plunge recklessly towards an irrational death. But purposefully towards a meaningful life. Zazen in its perfect form means thinking nothing.
“So I sat there, thinking nothing for a few days,” says the Shihan with the blue eyes. “And after that, although on the outside, the situation was still the same, I suddenly stopped feeling resentment and started feeling gratefulness.”
“There are many types of prayer,” he says, putting his hands together in front of his chest. “But what matters is the feeling we put into our gestures, not the form they take. It is the feeling that gets through, across language barriers. If it is real gratefulness we feel, we can communicate it to anyone. And rather than thinking about other people, about a single hand, a single direction, think this: you are a beautiful castle with a moat around it. That’s where things happen. Inside that beautiful castle.”

In my children’s classes, we have spent our last three lessons with the three little hippos. First, we made a straw house. Then a stick house. Then a brick house. The wolf couldn’t blow the brick house down, but there are more evil things out there than wolves. Dark nights. Tan tights. Closed ATMs. Alarm clocks. Yawns. Maybe it is time for me to upgrade again. Maybe I should build a castle. Not out of straw, sticks or bricks this time. What makes the perfect form? Let me think, let me think, let me think. And when I stop thinking, I can start building.